People Pressure Men, women, and children
packed onto a circular bamboo-and-buffalo-hide
coracle (above) make their way to a village celebra
tion on the edge of Bandipur. As the human popu
lation grows, unprotected forests are obliterated.
Village women (left) who live outside Nagarahole
must now walk more than three miles across a
denuded landscape every day to find enough wood
to cook meals for their families.
once common throughout the southern half of
the Ghats, but poaching and the steady loss
of their habitat have reduced their numbers
to fewer than 2,500, most living in small, scat
tered bands whose future is at best uncertain.
Roughly a third of them endure here unmo
lested, beneficiaries of a unique partnership
between the state forest department and the
successors of the planters who had altered the
ecology of the lower slopes forever.
Our host at Munnar is a senior manager of
the sprawling gardens belonging to the Tata
Tea company and the man most responsible
for making that all-important alliance work
over the past few years. K. N. Changappa
"Chengu" to his friends-is a tough but soft
spoken 33-year veteran of the tea industry
whose love for his region and its wildlife is con
tagious. As we drive up toward the park, he
explains how this unique sanctuary was estab
lished. "British planters started it in 1928 as
an exclusive reserve. Already the tahr were
disappearing." A planters group, the High
Range Game Preservation Association, ran it
and turned their hunting guides from the local
Muduvan tribe into game-watchers. When the
state took over the unplanted areas in the
1970s, the association persuaded the forest
department to declare the Eravikulam plateau
the first national park in Kerala and to share
its management. "We changed our name to
the High Range Wildlife and Environment
Preservation Association after shooting was
outlawed," Chengu continues, and he has been
its chairman for many years. "We still pay the
tribal watchmen. We're working to control
tourist traffic: Only 5,000 visitors came to see
the tahr in 1993; in 2000 there were more than
150,000. And we've undertaken a large-scale
program to regenerate shola."
The surroundings are spectacular, but life on
these sheer, rain-drenched slopes is remote and
WESTERN GHATS